Crikey can show, for the first time, the five city metro share in audience for both High Definition (HD) and Standard Definition (SD) free to air television.
| HD and SD Channels 5 City Metro share | |
| 6pm to Midnight August 24 2009 | |
| ABC1 | 15.70% |
| ABC2 | 1.30% |
| Channel Seven | 29.50% |
| CHannel Nine | 24.80% |
| GO! | 1.60% |
| Channel Ten | 19.80% |
| OneHD | 1.00% |
| SBS1 | 5.80% |
| SBS2 | 0.50% |
The combined audience share for the four separately measured SD/HD channels last night was 4.40%, with more people watching Nine’s Go than any other channel.
Seven is the only network without a clearly defined, separately measured HD channel. Any viewing of Seven’s HD channel is included in the nightly share figure for 6pm to midnight.
Seven is still deciding on what its HD channel will look like, but you can see that by not breaking it out, it can charge advertisers as much as it can for the programming on its main channels, and not have the advertisers come back with discount demand because of the number of people watching on the HD channels.
Advertisers paying Ten and Nine for ads on the main channel will start to discount for the audiences on the HD channels. Both will charge separately for advertising on those channels. The trick will be to try and replace any revenue loss from the main channel.
The ABC’s second channel is the oldest and most consistent performer. Later this year it starts its kids channel.
In terms of eyeballs, its harder to work out at the moment, but it could be a collective 130,000 to 170,000 watching.
Nine’s Go is a SD channel, not HD. It was number one last night, as it was on Sunday.
“Seven is the only network without a clearly defined, separately measured HD channel”. Apart, that is, from the ABC, SBS and Nine. ABC2 is an SD only channel, as are Go and SBS2. In fact there’s only one separate HD channel, One.
If Crikey’s Media Expert doesn’t know the difference between digital and HD, what chance do the public have?
Thanks Gavin, good point. He seems to be confusing ‘digital’ and ‘HD’. Indeed I wonder if Glenn even has a digital decoder, as I’ve never heard him mention the interesting shows on ABC2 or the old TenHD last year. These HD decoders have been on sale for 8 years now but I’ll be damned if I listen to another polemic on Crikey about the failings of HDTV, when it now seems they’ve never watched an HD show in their life.
CK.